Harry Hooper: An American Baseball Life

Sport and Society

by Paul J. Zingg

Through the figure of Harry Hooper (1887-1974), star of four World Series championship teams and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Paul Zingg describes baseball's transformation from an often rowdy spectacle to a respectable career choice and entertainment institution. Zingg chronicles Hooper's rise from a sharecropper background in California to college and then to the pinnacle of his sport. Boston's lead-off hitter and right fielder from 1909 to 1920, Hooper later played for the Chicago White Sox, managed in the Pacific Coast League, and coached Princeton's team. When he retired in 1925, he held every major fielding record for an American League right fielder. Hooper's diaries, memoirs, and six decades of letters offer a rich and colorful commentary on the evolution of the game, as well as insight into the tensions between a player's public and private lives.

Genres: Sports, Baseball

312 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1993

Reviews

[Teressa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was coerced into reading this by my other half. I had enjoyed previous baseball biographies, like that of Jackie Robinson, so I began to read. For me, this book was a slog, except for the epilogue where it started to get good. Most of the book was filled with statistics that mean nothing to me. If you're really into baseball and you like statistics, then this is a book for you. If, like me, you just enjoy reading about people's lives, choose another book. It took me over 2 months to get through these 224 pages. When the author described Harry's life, it was a good story, but when it was all about comparing statistics to other players, I was bored to tears.